Dellwyn Stuart: Why the ‘motherhood penalty’ isn’t to blame for the pay gap

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Opinion

OPINION

Yes, we need to keep talking about the pay gap.

But the issue is much more complex than Bali Haque and Dr Michael Johnston suggested in their recent opinion piece published in the NZ Herald on March 12, in which they posited the idea of a “motherhood penalty” as being the fundamental caused of pay disparities between working men and women.

Several research studies by the Government and academics have clarified only 20 per cent of the pay gap can be attributed to factors like job choice, education level and family responsibilities. The remaining 80 per cent cannot be easily explained as being down to anything other than attitudes, assumptions and discrimination.

The good news is New Zealand businesses do have significant levers in their control, some of which can certainly help to give working mothers and mothers returning to work a fairer go.

Already in New Zealand, there are more than 100 employers reporting their pay gaps on the Pay Gap Registry. This is proof of what can be achieved by progressive employers that really want to understand pay gaps at their organisations and what can be done to address them.

In my work over the past few years leading the Mind the Gap campaign, I’ve yet to encounter a business that sets out to have a pay gap. But when these companies actually do carry out the measurement, they almost always find such gaps. Currently in New Zealand, we have organisations with gaps as small as 3 per cent and others with gaps greater than 30 per cent.

Haque and Johnston talk about parents wanting more flexibility, and of course many do - both fathers and mothers.

Employers need to look at why some roles in their organisations don’t allow the flexibility parents need. If the flexibility of contact centre work can be available in marketing, or in supply chain management, then the business creates a larger pool of accessible talent and women have the opportunity to progress in the organisation.

Another way businesses are tackling gaps is looking at gendered roles – those roles that overwhelmingly attract only men or women. The solutions might well be in a business’ control, including having more visible role models, a different approach to training and development, and in some cases the setting of targets.

Or they might require whole sectors looking at how they can get more women and people of different ethnicities into areas where said diversity is lacking, such as science and tech. There is good work being done here in New Zealand in Stem, but surely there’s a long way to go.

When employers do pay-gap analysis and reporting, they often also discover there is a bias in their hiring and promoting practices they hadn’t previously been aware of.

One organisation I’m familiar with learned from its data that when men and women of equal experience were promoted, men were always offered a salary higher in a pay band than women were. This is straight-up unconscious bias, and sounds very much like the “short-changing” Haque and Johnston downplay in their article. The good news is that it’s fixable.

And then there are bigger organisations with their own parental leave policy. What sort of behaviour does your policy incentivise? Do you offer equal partner leave? Do you have a return-to-work support programme for parents – not just mothers - keeping them up to speed on the organisation’s developments and training while they are away?

There is a significant number of things organisations can do to lower their pay gaps. A legislative framework with a New Zealand standard of measurement and reporting would help to make this a more efficient system. That’s why the Mind the Gap campaign continues to call on our new coalition Government not to let us fall even further behind in New Zealand in comparison to progress made globally.

Dellwyn Stuart is the CEO of YWCA and a co-founder of the Mind the Gap campaign.